Paul Bass Photo
Officers monitor a closed intersection at Dixwell and Bassett Monday.
Just about every city street should have a single lane plowed down the middle by mid-Tuesday, Mayor John DeStefano predicted Monday.
That doesn’t mean you should drive on the roads. Officials continued to plead with people to leave their cars home so New Haven can proceed with its efforts to clear streets in the wake of Winter Storm Nemo’s historic dump of 34 inches of snow.
And police set up “advisory” blocks at New Haven’s borders to urge drivers to stay out of town.
The city has cleared all major arteries so emergency vehicles can pass through, city Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts reported shortly after noon Monday.
Now it has directed crews into every neighborhood to plow a stripe down every street, no matter how small. The city now has some 120 pieces of equipment in use including 27 payloaders, enough to hit all 22 plow routes, plus 92 trucks, according to Smuts. The city is hiring day laborers to help, too. The National Guard, meanwhile, has been helping the fire department respond to emergencies.
Smuts predicted that maybe 5 percent of streets won’t get any plowing by mid-Tuesday — “the ones where we really have cars that are wedged into the middle of the road that are hard to get out.” Plows and emergency crews have been stymied all over town by people who get in their cars, then get stuck. (Read about some of that here.)
Meanwhile, some crews will get to work on the following priority: cleaning up intersections and main arterials.
When that’s all done, the city will return to neighborhood streets to widen the plowing to accommodate car traffic, Smuts said. That should take “a couple of days.”
DeStefano and Smuts at a 2 p.m. briefing Monday at the Emergency Operations Center.
Even that scenario could be complicated by the weather: Some forecasts predict snow may fall on Wednesday. Smuts said officials have heard those reports, but the forecasts they rely on most are showing temperatures in the 40s and skies sunny on Wednesday. Still, officials are “keeping an eye” on both the Wednesday forecast as well as longer-term predictions of precipitation over the weekend.
The rainfall and higher temperatures Monday were combining to turn some city streets into lagoons gathering around islands of treacherous hard-packed ice, slush and snow.
Police Chief Dean Esserman and Assistant Chief Luiz Casanova Monday morning stationed themselves amid one such treacherous stretch, Dixwell Avenue in Newhallville near the Hamden line, for a press conference Monday morning.
A block from where a platoon of CT Transit buses stood stranded, Esserman repeated pleas for people to stay home so police and other emergency crews can get around to make rescues and clear streets. Esserman announced that he has assigned cops to set up roadblocks at borders to urge drivers to turn around rather than enter New Haven. “There’s no parking downtown. The streets are bad,” he said.
“It’s hard to get angry at Mother Nature. But it’s been tough,” he said. “First came the snow. Then the rain. Staying home will help us do our job better.” He said New Haveners “have been great” about helping each other out of jams, including pushing police cruisers that have gotten stuck.
Other cities issue large fines when people drive during a natural disaster, and ruin things for everyone.
Can we institute that here?
I'd rather see a few dozen scofflaws get $1,000 tickets than see child pedestrians and sick people dying because the streets and sidewalks are not passable.